In a recent interview for liberty central, Bob Geldof pointed to an apparent paradox at the heart of human rights: rights are western but the west considers them universal. President Obama hinted at this in his inaugural address, proclaiming: "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals," he said that only by returning to its "values" could the United States lead the world again. But are human rights western? And if so, can they be western and universal at the same time? The Universal Declaration and the Covenants on civil and political and social and economic rights have been adopted throughout the world. Human rights are presented as the ideology after "the end of ideologies", the only values after "the end of history". But controversies persist, particularly around issues such as cultural relativism, humanitarian intervention and the UK's Human Rights Act.

As philosopher Jacques Maritain observed, "We agree on the rights, providing we are not asked why. With the 'why,' the dispute begins." Instead of understanding the underlying justifications (and alternatives) for rights, however, a chorus of human rights supporters repeats a limited number of soothing banalities, asking us to simply act, join in, save the world as a palliative for a bad conscience. These slogans have become a mantra. As a result, many fail to understand why others disagree that rights are or can be universal. This essay, which launches a series exploring and deconstructing the paradoxes of rights, probes such tensions by briefly pursuing the trajectory from natural law to natural and later human rights, drawing parallels between the earlier traditions and contemporary debates.

Tracing a genealogy of rights

The first reference to human rights appears in legal writings of the 1920s but to truly understand the concept you have to go back to the Greeks, for whom the universe and each being has a unique nature that determines their purpose. This idea of a rational "nature" allowed Socrates and Aristotle, the Sophists and the Stoics, to explore what is "right according to nature", using reason against received opinion and ancestral authority. This common conception of the good and a shared ethics united the Greek world, which did not separate morality from legality. Later, Stoic philosophers changed natural law into a universal, eternal and absolute reason – a great aid to Roman empire-building. Indeed, philosophical universalism has unerringly driven western imperialism ever since.

With the Christianisation of the Roman empire, concepts of natural law were set against theological priorities, in which the biblical God is an omnipotent legislator. Sophisticated Roman law was gradually turned into a set of commandments given in the scriptures. This divine natural law was judged to be superior to state law and became a powerful weapon in the hands of the church. When ecclesiastical superiority was achieved, natural law turned into a doctrine justifying state power. For the great attraction of natural law was its flexibility and the formidable power it gave to its interpreters. Human rights are no different.

In the 14th century, nominalist theologians began to argue that God's will has primacy over his reason. Natural law was imposed by God on the world – and He was capable of changing it radically. Nominalists abandoned the classical belief in a rational and intelligible world and argued that individuals rather than communities are the building blocks of the cosmos, their relations external rather than immanent. Social relations and abstract concepts such as justice or the city, they believed, are artificial and do not have independent existence. They come to life because we give them names. As Margaret Thatcher (who might be called a contemporary nominalist) put it, there is no society, only individuals and families.

The crucial divide in contemporary debates is between those who believe that human rights are held universally in identical ways and relativists who deny this. Relativists resemble classical Greek philosophers, believing that a moral code can only work if it meets the values of a particular society. In contrast universalists often follow nominalism, arguing that laws and values can and must be imposed from outside, and that since social relations are external and artificial even reluctant societies will soon fall in line and accept the universal code. Our recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ostensibly exported universal values of human rights and democracy but in reality belonged to the nominalist tradition.

Life, liberty and property

By early modernity, the nominalist position was dominant and turned nature into an inanimate object emptied of spirit or harmony and society into a collection of self-interested individuals. Natural law was split: on the one side were the immutable laws of nature describing physical regularities; on the other, human laws of church or state disciplining people who no longer practiced virtue or believed in a common good. The writings of Hobbes, Locke, Paine and Rousseau, which drew on these debates, altered the political and legal landscape. Rousseau was the favourite author of the French revolutionaries, whose first act was to pass a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Paine's The Rights of Man greatly influenced the American revolutionaries, while natural rights theory animates the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. After the revolutions, what was "right" according to ideals of natural law was converted into "natural rights": a bunch of personal powers and liberties, typically those of life, liberty and property, which belong to people because they pertain to their nature. Philosophers observed people and, by deducing the basic needs and desires of human nature, drew up a constitution allegedly agreed in a fictitious social contract. For Hobbes, writing during the civil war, the need for security called for a "mortal God", the all-powerful state. Locke, in more peaceful times, promoted a balanced constitution and property rights. Rights became the tools through which modern, western societies pursued their antagonistic conceptions of a happy life.

The invention of the social contract created the possibility of resistance, and even revolt, if state laws violated individual rights. However, this subversive potential was all too obvious to the victorious revolutionaries and soon, natural rights atrophied. The 19th century was the epoch of social engineering in the west and its colonies. Appeals to moral principles or individual rights were seen as reactionary hurdles to progress. As the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham put it, talk of natural rights is "nonsense, nonsense upon stilts". The study of sociology, economics and psychology, and the work of Durkheim, Weber and Marx, exploded the myth that certain rights are natural and inalienable, while the rise of mass political parties accelerated the decline of natural rights. By the first half of the 20th century, the theory of natural rights had been discarded as outdated religious conservatism.

Natural rights were only rehabilitated during the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals – in the new form of human rights. The allied judges were faced with a legally compelling defence. The German defendants had followed Nazi laws and acted within the limits of state law – the only valid law, according to the orthodoxy of the time. To deal with this conundrum, the court argued creatively that the systematic exterminations of Jews and others had violated the customary law and principles of civilised nations. In doing so, the tribunal re-discovered the main tenets of natural law: its insistence that a hierarchy of laws exists and that, irrespective of domestic law, universal legal principles prevail.

Crimes against humanity

Throughout history, slavery, extermination of indigenous populations and colonial atrocities had been repeatedly committed by the west. Now, however, that Europeans had tried to exterminate other Europeans, the concept of "crimes against humanity" entered the legal lexicon, and humanity was split into victims and perpetrators. After 1945, it was belatedly accepted that humanity is the exterminating angel against itself. Nuremberg and the 1948 UDHR inspired a huge international process of standard-setting. Hundreds of declarations, conventions and agreements were since adopted by the United Nations, regional bodies and states. Human rights diversified from first generation civil and political or "negative" rights, associated with liberalism, into second generation economic, social and cultural or "positive" rights, associated with the socialist tradition, and finally into "third generation" or group and national sovereignty rights, associated with the decolonisation struggles. Commissions, tribunals and courts rapidly followed. Has humanity become safer as a result?

Once "right" meant the right answer to a moral-legal question, reached through contemplation of the "great chain of being". Until early modernity, individual rights did not exist; duties were the building blocks of morality. The social ties of cities and communities created a strong sense of moral duty and virtue. As Hannah Arendt controversially said, Athenian slaves had a better life through the duties of their masters than the early 20th century stateless minorities – or the refugees of today – who enjoy various theoretical rights but have no real protections. Arendt's point is a useful rejoinder to Jack Straw and the Tories who argue that duties should be introduced into human rights law. Our law legislates obligations in crime or tort, but moral duties cannot be easily legislated.

The horrors of the second world war made it clear that democracy and national legal and constitutional traditions cannot prevent large scale atrocities. As Arendt put it, "It is quite conceivable that one fine day, a highly organised and mechanised humanity will conclude quite democratically – namely by majority decision – that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof." International human rights were conceived as a type of higher law prevailing over national policies. In this sense, human rights are intrinsically anti-democratic, when acting in defence of the vulnerable and the oppressed against the prejudices of the majority. They attempt to impose restrictions upon governments and legislatures to prevent them from being beastly to the "others" of each epoch and society. To paraphrase Nietzsche, if God, the source of natural law, is dead, he has been replaced by international law.

So are human rights western and/or universal? Undoubtedly their family tree is western. Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam and African religions have their own approaches to ethics, dignity and equality – many of them similar to the western version. But non-western philosophies and religions retain a stronger communitarian base with their emphasis on duties arising from strong social links and were not part of the early development of the human rights movement. John Humphrey, who prepared the first draft of the Universal Declaration, was asked to study Chinese philosophy before getting down to work. "I did not go to China," he reported later, "nor did I study the writings of Confucius." Are human rights universal? This brief history sets the parameters for an intelligent discussion of the most important question for the political philosophy of our times.